Leon S. Kennedy is a car salesman now

I have been provided a copy of Resident Evil Requiem for review purposes not by Capcom's PR team, but by my own brother, who threw the game at me at 10:30pm on a Saturday night like a £60 baseball pitched at my skull. In our family we call this a "golden spanner" - a nice surprise that fucks up your entire week's plans. But he made the error of not setting a deadline, so our review will be late.

I have played long enough to discover one important thing. It is not only a horror game, but also a big advert. The developers have delivered unto Resident Evil the overt product placement techniques of a James Bond movie. It was previously thought that Leon Kennedy was deemed too heroic and cool to leave out of this story. The truth is he was required to appear because the game needed a man to sell cars and wristwatches.

The first advert lands almost the moment Leon appears on-screen. He's inspecting a murder scene - something is rotten in this city. But a call comes in, his handler says he should go check it out. Leon's on it. He hops in his patrol car - sorry, his Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT - and vrooms off to save the day.

As he arrives to apprehend the perp at the scene of the crime, the camera lingers on the badge of the car. It is a Porsche. Leon drives a Porsche, it is something you should know about his character. In some action games, your trigger finger is disabled if you aim your gun at your NPC allies, making it impossible to shoot your story-critical friends. In Resident Evil Requiem, you cannot shoot the Porsche. 

Not long afterwards, Leon arrives at his next appointment. He has driven (in his Porsche) to an upmarket yet haunted hospital where he is asked to take a seat in a waiting room. He pointedly checks his wristwatch - sorry, his limited edition Hamilton timepiece - while waiting for the suspect to present himself for questioning.

"Leon wears a unique Khaki Field Auto Chrono," says Hamilton about their watch which you too can buy for the low low price of 1800 Swiss Francs, "a rugged all-black timepiece with bullet-inspired pushers and a wing detail at 9 o’clock honoring fallen comrades." Ah, I see. Leon wears his Hamilton in memory of his dead friends, perhaps Marvin, the zombifying colleague Kennedy knew for approximately twenty minutes in 1998. I have not played long enough to know if the watch can be damaged.

Leon is not the only culpable cop here. Grace Ashfield, the scaredy-waredy ickle-wickle FBI agent, who is both first girl and - I'm guessing - final girl, also shows off a terrifyingly priced timepiece any time she raises her hand to timidly-wimidly open a door in her default first-person mode. This watch is cheaper than Leon's, because it is for girls.

Once you have seen this watch, it is hard to unsee it. Like the Monster Energy cans in Sam Bridges' sleeping quarters or the Cup Noodles that sustain Noctis and the lads throughout Final Fantasy XV, the product placement here manages somehow to both add to the ridiculous schlock that Resi has always provided, and cheapen the world at the same time. Except unlike those other intermittent product appearances the wristwatch shows its face at every threshold in a horror game that is famous for thresholds.

Now, as a game, I'm enjoying the zombie punting haunted house so far, but this does not feel right. Leon would not drive a Porsche, for one thing, he would drive a Tesla, because he is a cop, and all cops are et cetera. But I would rather believe he drives a piece of off-brand shit. And the idea that one modern-day law enforcement agent would wear a luxury wristwatch instead of just checking their phone's clock like a normal person is already wild. Here, two cops of entirely different dispositions share the same rich person quirk.

If you are currently squealing with defensiveness: "It is a game about zombies Brendan! Oink. Is this really the thing that breaks your suspension of disbelief!? Grunt. Snuffle." Then, yes, brandpiggy. It is. Resident Evil is a hellworld that exists because a corporation got greedy, making it a laugh-or-you'll-cry irony to farm out that universe to any company, especially one that makes 8-cylinder gas guzzlers. Even if this were not incongruous with the background of the game's fiction, I will still sneer derisively at any piece of art that chooses to transparently advertise something wholly removed from its own world or story.

In short: begone, brand. Even the most batshit fictional world ought never to lose its self-respect. I pray that this does not continue. If a future Silent Hill game advertises any other cat food to me but Minmo, I will weep, for we will have lost something intangible and pure.